'A State of Un-Play'

What does game playing become after the innocence of childhood imagination? We are often confronted with playing games subconsciously as the controller or the player whereby we have our own rules, routines and rituals. A number of international artists exhibit their work at Atelier 35, Bucharest, Romania to visually explore an avenue of mind games, strategy and philosophical investigations.
Curated by Diana Ali.

credit name title

Concept

Game is defined as adopting goals, rules, challenges and interactions but as the philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein claims, games can be a misconstrued meaning of language and the mind.

Because we misunderstand language we use indirect communication, thought experiments and mind games to get a sense of one-upmanship to empower or demoralize. What extremes can we go to for feeling recognition, wanting, acceptance and achievement?

Featured artists explore the work ethic of game playing considering tactics, strategy and philosophical investigations as well as aesthetic work which deals with layout, intrigue and an appeal to take part. The exhibition includes, video, film, photography, installation, interventions, painting and drawing.

"bus stop" represents the transitional process of identity disintegration, were the subjects’ regressive phantasies, schemas, archetypes and social roles are incongruent with the socio-cultural demands. A social scene where the subjective interpretation of one’s’ own experience contradicts the artefacts of conformism and the cultural models of “normality”. A marginal situation which makes the actor aware of the fact that he is not just an actor and the game rules have been self-imposed in an effort to counter the dynamics of the dominant culture. The splitting processes of a symbolic game becomes an integral part of his identity and pushes him towards role engulfment and self alienation.

[advised to relax their muscles, the instruments are just sophisticated mirrors of spectacular

applications ]

Collage / photomontage on book cover / 26 X 22.5 cm unframed

UK

The ability to choose images containing within themselves the seed of their own destruction must not be influenced by the presence of manipulative hands in a room unpopulated by objects. We could tolerate tables and dust and maybe a few grammatological grimaces, but not the locked drawers and wooden puppets incapable of uttering the form of thought reliant on self-postponement and interior monologuesfolding and refolding the same infinite page.

Tree & Dressing focuses upon the ambiguous borderlines found within children’s illustration, between the traditional associations of such images [quaint/innocence/purity] and the point in which the image begins to insinuate an ‘adult’ atmosphere [violence/sexual perversion/exploitation]. Characters appear and disappear reframing the unfolding narrative in various suggestive directions, producing an ambiguous atmosphere.

Simon Farid makes work about alternative identity practices, investigating and enacting instances in which people operate under multiple administrative and social identities. Grant Shapps, an influential UK member of parliament, has more experience than most at operating under other identities. Here Farid focuses on Shapps’ Wikipedia editing skills, and attempts to hijack one of Shapps’ many identities as a result.

'CSA Series (Performances in the store cupboard/Avoiding Customer Service Assistance)'

3 x photographic prints, each approx 20 x 16 cm.

London, UK

“The focus on work as the arena in which the individual can, with the proper self-discipline, will his or her own self-development and transformation continues to be affirmed today … The worldliness of, for example, unruly bodies, seductive pleasures, and spontaneous enjoyment poses a constant challenge to the mandate for such focused attention to and diligent effort in properly productive pursuits”

While working as a Customer Service Assistant (CSA) in a regional museum and gallery I found the disjuncture between the positive, ambitious, self-motivated person required by the job advert and the mundane reality of the monotonous rigid role striking. Feeling bored and frustrated I started setting myself small challenges to keep my own creative work going while being paid as a CSA.

Although generally unsupervised, CSA’s were expected to adopt the mindset of management and remain professional in their work at all times so this project became a private game where I had to make as many small interventions and secret performances as I could without being caught by management and without completely alienating myself from my colleagues.

Exhibited in A State of Un-Play will be three photographs documenting this series of works.

The figure of a small white doll grows from a ball of modelling clay, is cut and sewn shut, and then buried and ‘reborn’, among a nest of white granulated sugar and the dark stain of slut’s wool - the fluffy dust that collects under furniture and along skirting boards.

Save State is an interactive game which is extremely critical of human rights violations produced by Apple and Foxconn. Upon initial release, the game was censored from Apple's mobile application store. This narrative chronicles the afterlives of seven overworked laborers who committed suicide while building the world's mobile devices.

A number of times each day we have only a moment to present ourselves to the world. Using whatever languages we have, we condense our vision and hope our reader understands enough to translate our intent.

Subjects are asked to described themselves or others in a number of words dictated by the subjects age, their responses their responses are then transcribed.

Through a kaleidoscopic lens Make Believe runs on a loop of an hour and 5 minutes, continually morphing between the distinguishable dancing limbs of a young girl (legs, hair, torso), and an abstraction of patterns formed from the little girls costume. Created over several artist residencies in America, the video explores the subjected roles of childhood and adulthood and the tumultuous transition between the two. Masked within a bottomless black void the haunting video explores human aloneness, the absurdity of adult existence, and the inability to reconnect with the innocence of childhood.

The Greatest Show on Earth, this video collage, is the history of televisor. Entered the habitats and received as the good speech, it has shaped the spirits and the attitudes, to become a doer of modern history.

The main idea of this object-pictures is to show how
the past can be combined with the present and future, and how they become
integral body in the process of adopting changes. To explore the action of
changing.

As a starting point I used satellite images of
different places (also from Romania). For
each object-picture I set together two different views creating a map which did
not exist in reality. Such a hybrid formation was tamed through linear traces
of sewn black thread. Intuitively I chose some shapes obtaining a spontaneous
drawing notation.

I am going to
make a kind of a visual game with viewers. Opens his/her attention by new
horizons of drawings. "Game playing"is for me likea mentaljourney. Eachpicture canbe readin many ways, each time differently. You canfocus your attentionin any place,movevirtuallyanywhere or at any pointbegin yourcontemplation. This sewn drawing
installation is like a big map with empty spaces/fields which can be completed
in viewers mind.

About the Curator

Diana Ali is a visual artist, independent curator, lecturer and workshop leader. She has exhibited in group shows in London, Sheffield, Manchester and solo at the Air- space Gallery, Hanley. Internationally she has shown work as part of the Roaming Biennial in Tehran, Other Asia’s exhibition ReDo Pakistan in Karachi, Pakistan, the Crafts Fair in San Francisco and at the Library Artspace in Melbourne, Australia. Her practice involves drawing, installation and text work. She is interested in correspondence, networking and connectivity and researches the use of collaboration through her curatorial projects. Her current practice is an extension of this research and sees curating as a research methodology involving instructional processes and exchanges. To date she has curated ten exhibitions including Subversive Correspondence featuring fifty artists in London and Bristol and & Dialogues: A Fake Romance in Swansea with thirty artists. Internationally she has curated A State of Un-Play at Atelier35 in Romania, Engagement & Entrapment, Israel, Cyprus, South Korea extending her query of responses from the local to the global.